Covenant

A sermon for Sunday, March 8, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God who leads us in ways of wisdom and joy, thank you for bringing us to this time and this place. Make your presence known to us here today. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

When I was younger, I knew, I knew, that there was only one real way to pray. It involved you and the Lord and no one else, because the only real prayer was the honest prayer of the publican, not the prayer of the Pharisee, which was loud and could be heard on the street corners. No, the only real prayer was the prayer that was between just you and God, preferably with you on your knees, hands clasped in front of you, head turned up to the ceiling, eyes open or closed based on personal preference or depth of feeling. You had to pray what was on your heart, using words that only you would use. “God, I’m sorry that I laughed at Justin Thomas when he asked me out. I know you love him, I just don’t. God, I want to be an astronaut. Or a journalist. Or an astronaut-journalist. But I’ll go wherever you send me. Just tell me what to be. Also, be with Jessica—her cat’s not doing well. And be with Uncle Doug and Aunt Caroline as they deal with MS. And be with Sarah and help her to be smart around Robs. Amen.”

That’s how you pray.

Sarah and Robs got married, by the way, after they both graduated from college and found jobs. They have two beautiful children who call me Aunt Jo and who are interested in space and I think they’re a delight. God works wonders in life.

I still pray to God like that sometimes, though not always on my knees. Wherever I am when I pray, God is up and to the right and hears me when I ask for blessings, grace, and healing for other people, but I’m convinced that God will ignore me if I pray using some hifalutin words that I learned in some book somewhere. God doesn’t like it when you put on airs.

But what I’ve found as I’ve grown is that I only have so many prayers that I can pray to God. I can spend time thinking up new ones, and some of those are good and some of those are just okay, but after a while, those prayers all start to blend together. I am caught in my own perspective, after all, and I, unlike God, am not infinite nor omniscient nor omnipresent. I can’t see all there is to see in the world. I’m only one person. And my prayers are limited, in a way, by the fact that I am and will only ever be one person, one person limited by one body and one perspective.

And we know that Jesus shares wisdom when he talks about planks in our own eyes and splinters in another’s. Sometimes, we aren’t aware of our planks and it takes the perspectives and words of others for us to notice the planks on our own eyes, so that we can take them out. Since Lent is a time of self-reflection, of noticing what within ourselves mirrors God and what doesn’t, I want to offer us a new prayer each week of Lent that might help us notice some of those planks and give us the strength to pull them out. I want to give us some new-old prayers to pray this Lent.

So. Our first prayer is A Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition, a prayer that John Wesley included with the book he sent over to America in 1784 for worshipers here to use. (If you want to learn more about Methodism in America, you can come to tonight’s Foundations of Methodism study!) The prayer is one that would be used in covenant renewal services, when believers would remember their baptism and remember their promises to God. And it goes like this:

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,

exalted for thee or brought low by thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

to thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

You can pray a more modern version, without the thees and the thous, but the old soul in me likes the original wording. It reminds me that this is someone else’s prayer, from another time, and that I can let it push me and shape me, but I don’t have to hold onto it too tightly.

Which is good, because I have both loved and struggled with this prayer from the first time I read the first line. “I am no longer my own, but thine.”

That’s, uh, not very American, is it?

America is all about independence and self-determination and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and rugged individualism. The whole point of the colonies declaring independence from crown is that we, as the people of the United States of America, wanted to be self-governing, to be free. Leave it up to some Royalist Englishman to send over a prayer to the colonies that’s all about submitting to servitude, am I right?

The first time I prayed this prayer was when I was back at my home church on Christmas break, gathered with the brave group of souls who actually make it to church on the Sunday after Christmas. The Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan Tradition was used during Watchnight services, which would happen on New Years Eve, and so the pastor had decided to do a service about covenant renewal on the Sunday closest to New Years. As a college student, I was all about independence, all about figuring things out for myself, all about deciding who I wanted to be and how I was going to be it all on my own. I didn’t want to have anyone in authority over me. I wanted to be my own. I did not want to be God’s.

At the same time, though, I desperately wanted to belong to somebody. I wanted to be chosen. I wanted someone to pick me, to want me to be around them, someone who when they saw me wanted to see me again. I wanted a place and a people to be with. I wanted to know that my friends had chosen to be my friends, not that we were just friends of convenience, and I wanted to belong.

And so, this first line of the prayer sucked me in, and not in a totally healthy way. I wanted to belong so badly, could feel the ache with every atom of my being. Maybe I could belong to God. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe I didn’t need to belong with anyone else. Maybe, if I was good enough, if I was giving enough, if I erased myself enough, I could belong to God and that would be what I needed, what I longed for. I could be a Christian zombie, or a Christian puppet, allowing God to move my limbs wherever he needed them to move.

You have to admit, that first line has its problems.

So when you pray this prayer, I want you to pray the first line with the last few lines in mind. Pair it with: “I freely and heartily yield all things” and with “Thou art mine and I am thine. So be it,” because I think those lines have the key words that keep us from being Christian zombies when we affirm our covenant with God.

I freely and heartily yield all things means that this covenant that we’re entering with God, this agreement that we make with God, it’s a choice. No one is forcing us into it, not the expectations of others, not the fear of punishment, nothing is forcing us to choose God. This is the secret of Paul in Philippians, I think, how Paul has learned to be content with whatever he has. He chose to follow Jesus. He chose to follow Christ. He knew all the alternatives that were out there and the risen Christ appeared to him and Paul chose to believe that vision. Paul chose to believe in Jesus. It’s easy to give up everything you have for something that you really, truly believe in, easy to be content in all things when you know that you have gained the one thing in this world that really matters.

I’m not making an altar call out of this, but this prayer forces us to think about whether we have freely chosen God in our lives, or whether we’ve chosen God because we thought that we were supposed to. Is following Jesus the one thing that really matters in this world to us, and so we can be content with whatever comes our way, or is there something else that matters more? I’ll be honest, sometimes the thing that matters most to me is being right, not following Jesus. I would leave Jesus behind if I thought doing that would make me right.

This is the crux of the prayer to me, this question of freely and heartily yielding all things to God. Can I choose this freely? Do I want this covenant with God? Can I say this prayer with honesty and joy, or do I mutter it with regret and embarrassment?

Now, maybe you all have figured this out for yourselves and you know why you choose Christ and this prayer is an easy one for you. You’re happy to give all things up to God, to belong to God, to do whatever God calls you to do, to be put to suffering, to be laid aside, to be exalted or brought low, to be full or empty, to have all things or nothing. Maybe y’all have learned how to hand all things over to God and to rest in the shadow of God’s wings and maybe it is just the arrogant youth in me that struggles with this prayer.

Maybe y’all have it all figured out. But let me tell you how I figured out how to pray this prayer for myself anyway.

What clicks for me, what makes this prayer pray-able to me, and makes it into a prayer that can shape and form me to make me more like Christ, is to remember, as 1 John tells us, that God is love. God is love. God is goodness and kindness and mercy and truth and everything beautiful. God is love. And if I am ever to let go of my hard-won freedom from the things in this life that have held me bound, freedom that I now know I only gained because of the grace of God revealed to me in Jesus Christ my Savior, if I am ever to freely and heartily chose to hand over the direction of my life to anything at all, it must be love.

In the name of love, I can do whatever I’m called to do. I can be grouped in with whoever I need to be grouped with. I can run for miles and miles or I can rest. I can endure the difficulties of this world. If it’s in the name of love, I can be raised up unabashedly and if it’s for love, I can make do with nothing at all. I can be full or empty, regarded well by others or dismissed by others, I can be content in all circumstances, if I know that I belong to love and that it is in love that I act. I can with integrity give all of myself away if I am doing it in the service of love.

Because, when you give yourself to love, you get everything you need in return. Remember that the prayer declares “And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Thou art mine, and I am thine.” If God is love and if we, in giving ourselves to God, receive God in return, we will always have everything we need. It is not a soul-killing self-sacrifice. It is not mindless obedience. It is not zombie Christianity. Giving ourselves to God and receiving God in return is a vibrant, dynamic, life-filled thing. It is mornings and evenings of prayer, sharing and learning and giving and receiving. It is connecting with all those in whom God lives, seeing the divine love in all the places that it can be found. It is striving and caring and doing wonderful things for others, seeing the beauty of God in their faces in return. The prayer that this covenant asks us to make is a living thing, full of all the light of love come to life.

So friends, I ask that you pray this prayer each day this week. Let it work on you. Can you freely give yourself to our beautiful, vibrant, dynamic God who is love, or is there something in the way? Can you be content in all things or is there a need that must be met first? Do you desire to be in covenant with God or is that something that frightens you? Think through all of these things as you pray, be gracious with yourself, and raise up to God whatever is blocking you from praying this prayer with all your heart. As we’ve said before, this world put things between us and God and God is faithful to remove those things if we let God. And if nothing is blocking you, pray this prayer to remind you of the promise between you and God. You are God’s and God is yours and nothing on earth can change that.

So be it.

Amen.